The devices look almost organic, like some kind of weird little microorganism - and with our magnetic fields they are equipped to ‘walk.’ The ones we’re working on look like little metal cages made out of iron that are flanked by polymer branches that hang out. For example, we like to use iron molecules because iron tends to be biocompatible, and we can also use magnetic fields to make them move. They’re made of different chemicals, including carbon and metallic elements - and given these robots are in many cases being developed for use in the human body, they’re typically composed of materials that are compatible with our innards. In other words, microrobots are roughly bacteria sized, while nanorobots are about the size of a virus. Nanorobots are even more minute - smaller than a millionth of a metre, or about a 100 th the width of a hair. Microrobots are usually smaller than a millimetre but as large as a micron - that’s between a 1,000th of a metre to a millionth of a metre in size. ![]() ’We look at what kinds of microorganisms there are out there…to get some insight into the way nature works and figure out whether we have some technology or engineering possibilities that we could use to solve these problems,’ he said. But as these inventions get smaller, the laws of motion that govern these machines are not very intuitive, so researchers are drawing inspiration from nature, says Brad Nelson, professor of robotics at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, who focuses on these tiny intelligent machines down to nanometres in size.
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